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Jonah Pierre
Madre Vaca: Knights of the Round Table
by Jack Bowers
The legend of King Arthur and Camelot is depicted musically on Knights of the Round Table, the sixth album by the Florida-based eleven-member ensemble, Madre Vaca, whose themes are composed by drummer Benjamin Shorstein. While Knights is presented as a ten-part suite, there seems to be no connecting tissue aside from the names of individual works --"Arthur," Camelot," Galahad," Merlin," Guinevere" and Lancelot" among them. True, there seems to be an over-all medieval vibe underlining Shorstein's music, ...
read moreMadre Vaca: The Elements
by Jack Bowers
Ambitious? How about depicting musically four basic elements--fire, water, earth, wind--and doing so with only four musicians. On its fourth recording, The Elements, the guitar-led quartet Madre Vaca endeavors to do exactly that, and in roughly forty-one minutes. Each of the album's four selections was written by a member of the group: Fire" by drummer Benjamin Shorstein; Water" by guitarist Jarrett Carter; Earth" by bassist Thomas Milovac; Wind" by pianist Jonah Pierre. So how do they fare? ...
read moreMadre Vaca: Winterreise
by Jack Bowers
For its third recording, the Florida-based jazz octet Madre Vaca has chosen to perform music by Franz Schuberthold it; stop right there! Music by who? Yes, that's what it saysmusic by none other than Franz Schubert (1797-1828), an Austrian composer of what we know as classical music who in his brief lifetime wrote more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies (and the well-known Unfinished"), as well as sacred chorales, operas, and chamber, piano and incidental music. When did ...
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